What is hack.org, really?

The Temple of the Moby Hack is the shared computer and network
resources of a few friends and acquaintances. Some of us might be
computer hackers in the old meaning of computer
enthusiast but most of our users simply prefer using the
non-commercial hack.org services. All in all, about 30–40 people
depend on these services. Then there are all the mailing list
subscribers and all the people reading local users' blogs, et cetera,
et cetera. It adds up to a lot of people.

Caretakers

A few other machines addressable with a *.hack.org name are handled by
their owners. Some vanity domains and corresponding virtual web
servers are taken care of by their owners.

Any contacts regarding these services should be done through
electronic mail to “mc” at an easily guessed domain.

Responsibility

Anything found on a user's web pages, on a user's server or anything
sent by a user from an address at hack.org or one of the vanity
domains hosted here is their responsibility. No one else is
responsible and the temple itself is so disorganized that it's silly.

That said, MC aims to take quite good care of the main machines in the
hack.org network and the silly web filtering companies that seems to
have a gripe with any web servers under hack.org plainly have it
wrong. You might be interested in reading MC's blog entry
“hack.org blocked by web filtering companies”.

Services

The main hack.org server is currently known as “totoro”. It's a
Supermicro Superworkstation with an incredibly fast 6 core Intel Xeon
W3680 at 3.33 GHz, 24 gigs of threeway ECC RAM, and a ZFS mirror on
top of redundant disks.

totoro runs FreeBSD and many server
programs. Apart from the main box there are also many other hosts in
the Moby Hack Network, both under the hack.org zone and other domains.

Most users of the main server use it only for mail. Some users have
the ability to update web pages. A small number of heavy users have
shell accounts, mostly used for mail, chat and software development.
totoro also occassionally run some virtual machines, mostly for
experiments and software development.

Please note that users are invite-only.

History

The system can be said to trace its history back to a bulletin board
system in the +46-650 area code (that's in the north of Sweden) in the
late 1980s. In the early 1990s the BBS advanced to a public access
Unix system in the +46-13 area code (still Sweden). The Unix system
had a bulletin board first known as The Hack Machine and later as
IBKOM running the SklaffKOM software that MC ported to D-NIX.

We were a dial-up system until 1996 but users had UUCP access for mail
from the early 1990s. The UUCP name was “closet“ reachable as
lysator.liu.se!closet.

We got leased line IPv4 access in 1996 and registered the hack.org
domain the same year. We had tunneled IPv6 from 2002. We got native
IPv6 access in early 2008.

The machines and operating systems running the services have varied
over time. Some landmarks from ancient times to now:

During an emergency breakdown in the early 2000s the most important
hack.org services even ran on a Thinkpad laptop on MC's kitchen table!

The connections to the world have varied a lot. During the modem
years, the speed varied from 2400 bit/s to 9600 bit/s. After the
dial-up period, the speed went from 128 kbit/s to the current 100
Mbit/s.